Review by Michael O’Malley
In Taylor Swift’s song “End Game” from her 2017 album Reputation, the iconic songwriter/pop star/tabloid-lightning-rod sings, “I swear I don’t love the drama; it loves me.”
This is one of those perfect Taylor Swift lines – the cutting efficiency, the clever parallelism, the multifaceted meaning freighted by a dozen personal and professional contexts. It’s also the sort of line that often drives the Taylor haters up a wall: it is, they might say, yet another example of Taylor “playing the victim” (a critique of the artist that’s been ever-present since her first real tussle with celebrity toxicity, the infamous 2009 “Imma let you finish” VMA moment with Kanye West); it is once again an exhibition of Taylor Swift cynically profiting off people’s critiques of her; it is further evidence of an artist whose songwriting career has often hinged on coy (and sometimes not so coy) interactions with both relational and tabloid iterations of “the drama” acting as if she is merely a passive recipient of that drama; etc. I mean, you probably know how this goes. There is not a single celebrity right now as ostensibly beloved as Taylor Swift whose every action receives such relentless criticism.
Miss Americana, the new Taylor Swift documentary released just last Friday by Netflix, is always squarely in the pro-Taylor camp, and as such, it never directly wrestles with these critiques, nor the more substantive ones centered around the way that Taylor Swift’s relationships with people of color and the LGBT community (to say nothing of her ideas of class) are often filtered through her own comparatively privileged point of view – all of which might be frustrating to people looking for an Errol-Morris-esque deep dive into the dark complexities of a public figure. This is no American Dharma. This movie – constructed from both original interview/fly-on-a-wall footage of a contemporary Taylor Swift putting together her 2019 album Lover as well as archival footage of Swift’s performances and public appearances stretching all the way back to a pre-teen Swift learning guitar in front of her family – is largely interested in presenting how Taylor Swift was feeling during the period immediately following Reputation up through sometime in late 2019 (the part of her career in which Swift has done the most to course-correct her public persona in response to the mountain of scrutiny she’s received). Director Lana Wilson doesn’t do a lot to make the movie more than an attempt to re-humanize Taylor Swift after some of the more damaging discourse about her in the past 2-3 years, so if people want to be cynical about Miss Americana, they could probably find a lot of ammunition to the claim that it is merely a collection of footage curated to court the public’s good graces. It is, in that lens, a feature-length adaptation of that “End Game” line.
But in the same way that the frequent cry that Taylor Swift is “calculating” (as if any celebrity artist has a choice not to be) overly simplifies the complexity of Taylor Swift’s songwriting and public behavior, to merely call Miss Americana a PR-move would flatten the depth of a project like this. This critique ignores what the documentary does best: it simply lets a willing Taylor speak – not in the coded side-eyes of her songwriting or in the vaguely universalized speak of the occasional diaristic asides she gives fans at her concerts, but more in the style of a serious interview, which is something that’s rarer than you might think, given the amount of ink spilled about who Taylor Swift “is.” The Taylor Swift on display in Miss Americana is probably the most frank Taylor Swift the public has ever seen. There have been pieces like the recent Rolling Stone interview that catch her in a chatty, self-reflexive mood, but the unguarded way that Taylor talks about her private and personal struggles here is a level of magnitude more intimate.
She talks openly and thoroughly about her struggles with body image and an eating disorder surrounding the 1989 tour, for example, and allows the movie crew to film the moment when she tells her father and some label execs about her decision to go public with her support of Phil Bredesen over Marsha Blackburn for senate in the 2018 Tennessee midterm election. Both of these scenes are tense and messy, lacking the shrink-wrapped quality you might expect of deeply personal admissions from an artist as careful about her public image as Taylor Swift is. The Blackburn scene in particular is basically an open wound compared to the usual Swift media. Her mother yells at her father, one label guy worries that Taylor Swift might be the victim of a retaliatory attack, etc. – it’s thorny and uncomfortable in a way we’re not used to seeing from Swift.
And yet, it’s not hard to imagine a Taylor Swift documentary that is even thornier and more uncomfortable, because for as much as Swift opens herself up to more bluntly personal material here, Miss Americana never really interrogates what she says. It becomes conspicuous that, for instance, the movie mentions a ton of cruel journalism without ever mentioning any sticky insights a journalist may have had about Swift over the years. Similarly, whenever the Kanye drama comes up, it is always presented in the context of what Kanye has done to her, without ever engaging either with the ways in which she prodded at the relationship over the years or with at the ease with which she slotted into the broader cultural trope white female victimhood at the hands of black masculinity. Even during the sequence documenting the 2016 “Famous” controversy – certainly the nadir of Taylor Swift’s public image – much of what the movie gives us are clips of people defending Swift (despite the whole situation being pretty dicey all around). Whenever defenses or critiques of Taylor come up, the movie hews very close to Swift’s established story with not a ton of information to contextualize her views within broader cultural conversations – and what complicating information we are given about greater context typically comes in a montage of brief media snippets, a rush of information that gives more of a generalized feeling about how other people view Taylor Swift’s actions rather than any prolonged engagement with any one of these points of view. As such, Miss Americana is a documentary told from only one perspective – that of Swift herself.
And as tempting as it might be to imagine the muckraking documentary that could have been, these limitations also make up what’s sneakily great about Miss Americana. By never really allowing the documentary to break from Taylor Swift’s perspective, director Lana Wilson creates a movie that’s uncommonly subjective for the type of documentary that it is. Because it isn’t a documentary with much to say about the wider context of Swift’s actions, it somewhat by default becomes a documentary in which Swift is basically talking to herself about her own thoughts, experiences, and memories. Miss Americana becomes about the dialectic within Taylor Swift: what Taylor Swift thinks about herself.
This is no more apparent than in the two aforementioned moments regarding Taylor’s body shame and political endorsement. When she discusses her body image, Taylor paraphrases a few painful, shaming comments she remembers hearing about her image before pulling up a picture of herself on her phone and talking through the cyclically self-destructive thought process those comments have created in her brain. In the scene announcing her political endorsement, she repeatedly pushes back against the apolitical stances that her father and the record execs say “we” have always done things before – stances that, in a different scene, Swift discloses had been her own ideas, modeled after the famous political tight-lippedness of Dolly Parton as well as fear from the fallout that the Dixie Chicks faced in 2003 speaking out against George W. Bush. In both of these scenes, the camera is relentlessly focused on Taylor herself, to the point where it’s hard to tell the identity of the disembodied voices from offscreen – because ultimately, it doesn’t matter who is in the room: these are conversations that Taylor Swift is having with herself as much as with other people.
In that spirit, it is entirely possible that Taylor Swift never hears more trenchant critiques of herself than those this movie raises. To go simply by the material in Miss Americana, it seems as though Taylor Swift has heard more impactful comments about her body than she has about her posture toward people of color or the LGBT community (and in fairness, there probably are a lot more comments about that, given celebrity reporting). A good chunk of the back half of the film is devoted to the writing of Lover lead singles “ME!” and “You Need to Calm Down,” as well as the filming of their respective music videos, and there’s nothing within the documentary that even gestures toward the barrage of criticism these songs (especially “You Need to Calm Down”) generated with regard to the way it was perceived that Taylor Swift was accessorizing Pride Month in her own narrative (there is, in fact, a tossed-off line in the movie in which Taylor Swift is planning the “ME!” video by listing off things that she loves, casually mentioning “gay pride” alongside “cowboy boots,” which certainly doesn’t help the idea that she tends to view LGBT liberation as something of an ornament to her own problems). And given the doc’s larger project, it makes sense that the movie wouldn’t touch on this, since, at this point, it seems pretty clear that Taylor Swift hasn’t actually given these criticisms much internal dialogue – there’s a pure enthusiasm to the liberation that Taylor radiates in these scenes that indicates that the second-guessing and insecurity that Swift exhibits in other parts of the documentary hasn’t yet caught up with her decisions regarding these Lover songs (though the fact that Swift edited the “Spelling is fun!” line out of the album mix of “ME!” and that the final tracklist of the album buries these songs near the very end of the hour-long record might hint that eventually the opposite became true).
There’s something crushingly sad about the idea that without an internal monologue, Swift has nobody to bounce ideas off of. In one scene that takes place at the height of the Reputation-era backlash, Taylor laments to her mother (seemingly her only confidant and the only non-Taylor human who consistently has a screen presence in the film) that she doesn’t have anyone to talk to about her problems anymore. This is true even of a happier, healthier Taylor; during the “ME!” video shoot, Taylor Swift talks to her co-director about the shot they’ve just filmed and how she would like a reshoot because she feels that she appears too conniving in the shot, and the co-director just kind of sputters amiably about how he thought it was good and that he probably just doesn’t think about “this stuff” the same way as she does. The only person she has to talk to is herself: an ironic tragedy for someone who is apparently surrounded by others at almost all times.
This is the crux of Miss Americana’s life with Taylor and also of its understanding of fame in general. The movie presents celebrity life as not just privileged but also insulated (a wall of security separates her from the rabid crowd that waits at the door of her London flat), and in that insulation, it becomes cripplingly lonely. Internal monologue becomes a necessary structure of a life so secluded, because without it, the list of people she has is distressingly small.
Of course, Taylor’s life is not completely hermetic. Hisses of air enter her world in the form of the barrage of Discourse aimed at her, but within Taylor Swift’s world as depicted in Miss Americana, this Discourse is disembodied, not the real concerns of real people. There’s a clip from an interview with Swift immediately after the 2009 VMA debacle where stresses several times that she doesn’t know Kanye, and despite the fact that the two seemed to have had an on-again-off-again tense friendship in real life, the movie doesn’t really present Kanye West as anyone but, to appropriate a standout Reputation track, a stranger whose derisive laugh she could recognize anywhere. The same goes for every other criticism and controversy that Taylor encounters in this documentary, from the reprehensible comments about her weight to the accusations of duplicity to the calls for her to become politically active. In Miss Americana, these voices become about the attack, not the person the attack came from, because the architecture of Swift’s life – the architecture of fame itself – makes knowing these people in a personal way not only impossible but beside the point.
And what happens when a person as isolated as Taylor Swift hears voices so disembodied is that they inevitably become her own voice. In her career, this tendency culminates in the brilliant video to the otherwise silly song “Look What You Made Me Do,” which involves an army of Taylor Swifts battling one another up until the final minute of the video, in which the music stops and all that remains are various historical Taylor Swifts criticizing one another with words taken directly from criticism she has received from her public. In her personal life, this tendency results in that heartbreaking scene about her body image: the public heckles at her looking “pregnant” or “fat” become the voice in Taylor’s head that tells her not to eat, that her body is not good enough.
Compounding this is the fact that anyone sufficiently famous to be this alone is also famous enough that people feel like they know you. This is certainly the case for Taylor Swift, a lot of whose public discourse stems from how people read her motives – “she’s too calculating” – and clearly, Taylor has internalized this, too, as this is her go-to criticism of herself in the “ME!” shoot.
Which is where this all unavoidably collides with the issue of gender. It’s a topic that has always interested Swift (unavoidably, given the oftentimes misogynistic discussion surrounding her work), but particularly recently, with songs like Lover’s “The Man” and her opposition to Marsha Blackburn, for whom it’s Blackburn’s vote against the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act that is the real problem Taylor has with her (as opposed to, for example, Blackburn’s much louder campaigning on a platform of xenophobia and anti-immigration).
And gender is inseparable from the subjective reality that Miss Americana gives us. When nobody truly knows you, the assumption eventually becomes that everybody does – and for a female artist, it inevitably becomes an assumption that the audience knows what they really mean: aka what they’re hiding. Taylor addresses this directly at one point in the documentary, when she discusses how careful she must be as a female artist not to do something that might reflect poorly on her in the eyes of a public often disproportionately critical of female artists, and how this very care is often what results in the public's perception that she's "calculating." Though of course male artists also face public criticism, it's not hard to find the existence of conspicuous double standards.
Take, for example, the fact that Kanye West was coronated as an artistic genius for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, the album-length response/apologia to critiques of his public persona, whereas Taylor Swift, though in no shortage of praise at her generational songwriting talent, often also gets lambasted by accusations of opportunism or artificiality when she wrestles with the same issues in her art (especially the unjustly maligned Reputation). This isn’t a new problem in music. Consider also the case of one of Taylor Swift’s idols, Joni Mitchell, who, in contrast to the fawning hero worship the press piled on male artists like Bob Dylan, was often regarded with skepticism alongside her acclaim as a woman in an often male-dominated folk/rock world. For example, in 1971 Joni was slammed with a now-infamous Rolling Stone feature titled “Old Lady of the Year,” in which the magazine charted all the rock stars that Mitchell had reportedly slept with – in the same year as the release of her now-classic confessional-folk LP Blue, no less! Like Taylor, Joni is also deserving of some legitimate criticism (see: her long dalliance with blackface). But as with Taylor Swift and any number of female artists, any such meaningful criticism gets muddled with a sea of gendered sentiments that seek not to problematize her but to delegitimize and dehumanize her. Mitchell’s response was iconoclastic – to dig in her heels and just make a collaboration album with Charles Mingus or whatever, critics be damned. For Taylor Swift, who lives within a celebrity and social-media-driven landscape far larger and more relentless than Mitchell had to endure in the ’70s, such a response is, if not harder to pull off, definitely more difficult to find authentically.
Taylor Swift doesn’t seem to be interested in becoming a Mitchell-esque outsider. Despite her famously singing how love “made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter,” it’s clear that Swift still identifies much more deeply with that old careful daughter than with the rebel. Miss Americana begins with a voiceover of Swift explaining how she’s always felt compelled to be a “good girl,” and the generally wholesome image Swift has tried to curate over the course of her career attests to this compulsion. The documentary title itself, Miss Americana, speaks to a kind of people-pleasing archetype – half pageant, half Roy Rogers and apple pie – that embodies her aesthetic and moral aspirations.
For Swift, though, it can’t be that simple anymore. That title of course comes from the Lover track “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince,” and that song invokes the archetype mostly ironically, which seems the only way possible to invoke it in the aftermath of “Famous” and Reputation and 2016 in general. “I’m lost in the lights / American glory faded before me,” Taylor sings on the song. In a way, the archetype she’s sought to embody her whole career has crumbled at the hands of the ubiquitous criticism: she’s “ripped up [her] prom dress,” “saw the scoreboard and ran for [her] life.” As Taylor’s voiceover during the movie’s opening minutes concludes, the pursuit of the approval of millions of strangers is a project doomed to be a hollow failure, and her life has borne this out.
What Miss Americana then documents is a crucial turning point in Taylor’s self-conception as well as a variation on the typical existential refrain: when you have nothing but a swirl of chaos around you, the only place left to find meaning is within yourself. Miss Americana doesn’t end up showing Taylor Swift abandoning her quest to please, as the opening monologue might hint. What it does instead is show Swift’s re-orientation inward, the reconfiguration to a paradigm in which the person she wants to please most is herself. And even more paradoxically, this inward self-approval comes by way of outward political activism, as the documentary ends with the unveiling of Taylor’s first protest song: “Only The Young.”
The documentary’s title song “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince” does nothing to wrestle with the problematic elements of (to stick with the song’s allusions) a pageant or even of the racially coded idea of “Americana” itself, and in some ways, it’s a frustrating limitation of the documentary. But Miss Americana shows exactly how such a limitation – not just in a documentary but in a person herself – comes to be, and it’s all the more interesting and soulful and, yes, human because of it. To love, to limit: that’s what it is to be human.
As she says in the song, perhaps to her boyfriend, perhaps to herself: “It’s you and me; that’s my whole world.”